Marginalia & Meisterstücks: Backstage at the Comedy Cellar with Neil deGrasse Tyson
On the existence of aliens, the myth of the platypus, and why you should never use the word "marginalia" in front of the world's most famous scientist.
Tuesday, 21st April 2026
Greenwich Village, NY
There’s a very particular kind of electricity that hums in the green room of a live show at the Comedy Cellar.
It’s a kind of ‘casual nervous’ energy. Comedians pacing, staring blankly into the notes app on their phones, producers nervously checking their watches. But last night was different. Last night, I was backstage to introduce my friend, the brilliant Nayeema Raza, for a live recording of her podcast, “Smart Girl, Dumb Questions.” Her guest was Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Neil is currently launching his new book, a scientifically infused etiquette guide and user’s manual for what to do when we finally make contact with extraterrestrial life. So, naturally, the backstage conversation bypassed the usual polite New York small talk and immediately accelerated into the stratosphere.
The following is a full 8-part accounting of what results when you cram a top-tier podcaster, a New Yorker cartoonist, and a world-famous astrophysicist into a small room together before a show…
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Part I:
The Gravitational Pull of a Star
If you’ve ever wondered what Neil deGrasse Tyson is like in person, I can confirm that the man does not merely enter a room; he establishes a gravitational orbit.
He is exactly as you see him on television: booming, impossibly enthusiastic, relentlessly curious, and utterly immune to mundane small talk. While most people backstage are complaining about the MTA or the weather, Neil is dissecting the air pressure of vintage subwoofers.
Before we even sat down, we were talking about the old-school speakers bolted to the corner wall. Neil climbed on the stool to take a closer look at the rear of the Bose speakers and was explaining the sheer, concussive force of low-frequency audio. “It could blow out a match,” he told me, describing the air pressure coming out of the cones.
That is the baseline frequency of hanging out with Neil. Everything is a lesson in physics, delivered with the cadence of a guy telling a great story at a bar.
But the real magic started when Nayeema handed him a copy of his new book…
Part II:
The Texture of the Galle[x]y
In the publishing world, the moment an author holds the physical copy of their book for the first time is practically a sacred ritual. Neil’s book had just come off the presses on Friday, and this was his first time seeing the Advance Review Copy. He’d only ever seen a rough galley to read the audiobook from.
He ran his hands over the cover. “The texture’s great,” he said, entirely ignoring the text. “It’s a match for me.”
Nayeema immediately started grilling him on the premise. The book is essentially an etiquette guide for close encounters; a manual from an astrophysicist who wants to meet the aliens as badly as we do.
“Do you really want to meet them as badly as you say you do?” Nayeema asked, pointing out that government accounts always seemed to be denying their existence. (Editors note: This was written before this happened.)
Neil, waving off the conspiracy theories, explained his stance with the kind of bulletproof logic that only a scientist can casually drop in a green room. He doesn’t need blurry photos or secret files. He just needs biological evidence. “If anyone has ever in the history of alien sightings brought forth an alien, no one would ever have to ask, ‘Do you believe in aliens?’” he said.
I agreed. He turned to me and asked, “Do you believe in elephants?”
“Oh, I’ve seen elephants in person,” I replied.
“Then we don’t have to ask, ‘Do you believe in elephants?’” Neil concluded. He noted that he is perfectly happy to accept the internet’s favourite theory that all the aliens are stockpiled or hidden by the government. “I’m just waiting for them to bring one out. That’s all.”
Part III:
Ta[l]king Up Space
If an alien does land, the immediate question is: to whom do you take them? Nayeema joked about taking the alien to a celebrity, but Neil pointed out that if you’re the first human an alien meets, you’re officially on the hook to establish a baseline of universal intelligence…
You can’t just speak English loudly and slowly. They’re not French. You have to speak “Space.”
And how do you speak Space? You use the periodic table. Apparently.
“They will have the same periodic table as we do,” Neil explained. “Because these are the same elements across the universe. And if they have any understanding of them, it’ll be organised in the way we have organised it. That’s the only sensible way we can do that.”
Even if the aliens call the elements by different names, the underlying sorting code is universal. “It’s how many protons do you have?” Neil said. The universe has an ordering: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen.
If you want to talk to an alien, you don’t say, ‘Repeat after me…’ “You’re going to say, ‘Show me something that you might care about in the universe that is universal,’” Neil said.
And the ultimate universal language? Mathematics.
“If you are of this universe, you will be fluent in math,” Neil declared. “Because math is the language of the universe.”
Nayeema, realising the gravity of this, confessed that she might be utterly useless to an alien because she isn’t great at math. Neil, without skipping a beat, laughed. “Well, no, then you’re not as useful for the alien.”
Part IV:
The Vocabulary Constabulary
At this point, Nayeema asked Neil to sign her copy of the book. It was dog-eared, highlighted, and absolutely littered with handwritten notes.
As a chronic reader who always holds a pencil while I skim, I looked at her heavily annotated book and offered a compliment. “A good book should have marginalia,” I said.
The room stopped. Neil locked onto me like a heat-seeking missile.
“Marginalia?” Neil repeated, his voice rising in incredulity. “Why did… that word? What kind of—what’d you get on your... Is it Australian? Marginalia?”
I tried to defend myself. “Yeah, I’m going to be useless talking to the aliens, saying shit like that.”
But Neil wasn’t letting it go. “Tell me the last time you heard that word used... In the wild,” he challenged.
Maybe unless they’re “Sesquipedaliens?” I offered…
I had to admit defeat. Outside of a literature seminar or a pretentious attempt to sound smart, nobody uses the word “marginalia” in casual conversation.
“Only a pretentious nerd trying to sneak it into a sentence says marginalia,” Neil insisted triumphantly. I nodded. “Uh, yeah. That’s 100% me, dude.”
Nayeema, loving the fact that I was getting roasted by an astrophysicist, said, “Oh, yeah. He loves using big words.” I said, “I’m someone who uses a big word when a diminutive one will suffice.1” I smirked, thinking I was terribly clever.
Neil laughed, admitting that while he reads the word, he rarely speaks it. “I didn’t know how to pronounce it,” he confessed. It sounds like a paleontological term. “Yeah, there was a platypus in it,” he joked.
Which, of course, led to a complete dismantling of my home country…
“It’s a joke we all played on the world,” I said about the platypus. “It doesn’t really exist. We made those up to fuck with everyone.”
He argued that the platypus is just the leftover evolutionary meatloaf of animals. I agreed entirely. “All the fauna are in Australia. It’s whatever was left in God’s animal parts bucket.”
We commiserated over the fact that both America and Australia started as colonies for the British, but America somehow managed to scrub the stain from their history with much better PR.
Part V:
The Declaration of Inde(pen)Dence
So. As Nayeema again asked Neil to sign her heavily annotated (sorry, marginalia-filled) book, he pulled out a pen. Not just a standard Bic. He pulled out a masterpiece. I said, “Is that the Montblanc Meisterstück?”
Neil immediately clocked it. “Oh, so you’re a stylophile, too?” he said. I rolled my eyes “Stylophile? What kind of pretentious douchebag uses that word?”
He chuckled. I then admitted that, yes, as a certified sesquipedalian stylophile and cartoonist, I often even write with a bronze-nibbed dip pen and ink. However, the Meisterstück is the Rolls-Royce of fountain pens. (See here for Wes Anderson explaining it the way only Wes Anderson can.)
This simple admission triggered one of the most brilliant, fascinating historical hypotheses I have ever heard… followed immediately by its spectacular collapse.
Neil asked me if I knew the Gettysburg Address. As an immigrant who had to pass the U.S. citizenship test, I arguably know it better than most Americans. He said, “Run a few lines for me.” So I started reciting it: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that—” “Okay, that’s enough.” Neil stopped me.
He told me to look at the phrasing of the speech:
Four score and seven years ago.
Our fathers brought forth on this continent.
A new nation conceived in Liberty…
“There are six, seven, eight-word phrases,” he explained. “That is as much ink as fits in a single dip of a pen.”
It was a staggering thought. Neil’s hypothesis was that Abraham Lincoln composed the speech rhythmically, dipping his pen, writing a phrase, pondering, and dipping it again. “Your listening ability matches the number of words a single dip of a pen will put on a page,” Neil said. “So that the rhythm of that speech is exactly the pen rhythm and a listening rhythm as well.”
It made perfect sense. It was a pentameter driven by the physical limitations of nineteenth-century ink. I asked him if it was true.
“Well.” He cleared his throat. “It’s a good hypothesis,” Neil hedged.
He then told the story of how he tested it.
During the Obama administration, Neil visited the White House and found himself in the famous Lincoln Bedroom, which holds the original copy of the Gettysburg Address. He walked up to the document, ready to confirm his brilliant theory about the ink dips and prove how clever he was to ‘Barry,’ who was standing beside him.
He looked closely at the paper, squinting incredulously.
“…Well, shit,” he spat.
“What is it?” Obama asked.
He put his face in his hands.
“It’s written in f*#ing pencil.”
I burst out laughing. “Your whole hypothesis... right into the toilet. In front of the President of the United States.”
Part VII:
Hands Across America(ns)
Neil stopped mid-sentence about something entirely unrelated (I think we were still arguing about the platypus) and grabbed my hand. Not in a warm, collegial “lovely to meet you” kind of way. In the way a surgeon grabs a scalpel. Purposeful. Clinical. Faintly alarming. It started, as most things do with Neil, with an observation that nobody else would have thought to make.
Melissa, one of Nayeema’s producers for the event, mentioned offhandedly that her hands were always cold. A normal person would have said, “Tell me about it!” and moved on with their life. Neil deGrasse Tyson stopped the entire room.
“Okay. So, just a quick lesson in thermodynamics...”
Nobody had asked for a quick lesson in thermodynamics. Nobody asked for a quick lesson in anything. We were about to walk out on stage. But you don’t say no to Neil when he’s got that look on his face.
“Two hands,” he announced, “cannot feel the same temperature to each other.”
He had us shake hands. Her, cold-handed. Me, apparently running warmer than a radiator in January. The result, Neil informed us, was that her hand felt warm to me and my hand felt warm to her -simultaneously, from the same handshake, the same moment in time, two completely different thermal realities.
Then he turned on Love Story.
You know the scene -she takes him to meet his wealthy family for the first time, they get out of the car, they touch hands, and she says, “Your hands are cold.” And he says, “So are yours.”
Neil’s verdict: “Can. Not. Happen.”
Physically impossible. According to the laws of thermodynamics, if both hands were the same temperature, neither person would feel anything at all - no warmth, no cold, just mutual thermal indifference. The most famous romantic moment in 1970s cinema is, in the eyes of physics, complete fiction.
“So are yours.” Ruined. Forever.
He wasn’t done. We needed a control. A third person, Nayeema, was recruited. Her hands fell somewhere between Melissa’s arctic fingers and my apparently ursine body heat. Neil walked us through the logic with the equanimity of a man who has explained the cosmos to millions and found a Comedy Cellar green room no less worthy a classroom.
I realised later, exactly the kind of moment that explains why Neil deGrasse Tyson is what he is. He cannot let an ordinary observation pass. A producer mentions cold hands, and within sixty seconds, you have a demonstration, a movie citation, and a controlled experiment with three test subjects. All before the show has even started. All delivered with the insouciance of someone pointing out the weather.
I run hot, it turns out. In the most literal, measurable, thermodynamic sense of the phrase. Neil confirmed it. In front of witnesses. I am choosing to take this as a compliment.
Part VIII:
The Greatest Show (Off) Earth
Moments later, a producer popped her head in the door and gave us the signal: It was time to head to the stage.
I walked out to the mic to introduce Nayeema, fully energised by the bizarre, high-speed intellectual ping-pong match that had just taken place in the green room. And when Neil walked out onto the stage, the crowd erupted.
What struck me most about the live show was that Neil didn’t change his persona one iota when the microphones turned on. There is no “stage version” of Neil deGrasse Tyson. The man who sat in front of the live audience, blowing their minds about the cosmos and extraterrestrial contact, was the exact same man who had just spent twenty minutes ruthlessly mocking my pretentious vocabulary and lamenting Abraham Lincoln’s stationery choices.
Related Reading:
Nayeema handled the interview masterfully. Interviewing Neil is like trying to put a saddle on a hurricane- you have to let him spin, let him explore the tangents, and then gently guide him back to the thesis. She navigated his cosmic enthusiasm perfectly, keeping the crowd entirely in the palm of her hand. (Watch the full show below)
It was a phenomenal night. A reminder that curiosity, humour, and a little bit of being a pretentious dickhead (as long as I’m willing to be called out on it) are the best ways to navigate the universe.
And if the aliens do finally show up, I know exactly what I’m going to do. I’m handing them a pencil and taking them straight to Neil.
‘til next time!
Your pal,
PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.
This line is attributed to William Safire
I loved this!
for the record I say "marginalia" ALL the time
(well I said it once)
anyway it felt like I experienced this, thanks for the fun!
Thanks for making us part of this!